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Check out the February 2021 edition of Quality, featuring Leadership 2021, air gaging beyond the basics, force measurement, control chart analysis, and much more!
My work in inspection, and as a quality management system auditor, provides numerous opportunities to acquire knowledge. It also provides areas of risk for ensuring valid and reliable results.
Several critical components need to come together to form a machine vision system. This includes the sensor (typically within a camera) that captures a picture for inspection, the processing hardware (a PC or vision appliance) and software algorithms to render and communicate the results. In addition, lighting, staging, and lenses are required to set up a machine vision system.
Even in a normal year, achieving high levels of quality is no small feat; it's a daily challenge that requires buy-in from everyone. This year, as COVID-19 wreaked havoc on supply chains, worker safety and consumer demand, maintaining high levels of quality became a nearly superhuman feat.
In this article, I wanted to go beyond the simple go/no go measurements that most air gaging is used for. Air gaging is a highly effective and efficient way for measuring these simple diameter requirements. It is also extremely repeatable on tight tolerances, but for this article, I wanted to focus on using air gaging to measure form requirements such as roundness, flatness, perpendicularity/squareness, taper, straightness, matching, and others.
An SPC (Statistical Process Control) Software customer recently inquired if I could discern any issues in a process, as their customer had identified problems with three recent shipments. They provided data for the customer’s current year shipments for a variety of KPI (key process indicators) in an Excel file.
Force measurement is the measure of a push (compression) or pull (tension) against an object. It sounds elementary enough, but it’s a crucial part of quality control testing with more and more applications in today’s globalized supply chain. The needs for force measurement are all around us.
In a recent quality management class, group discussion centered on frustration in the workplace resulting from lack of appropriate employee recognition. Several people recounted how disappointing it was to go “above and beyond” only to find there was little appreciation for what was accomplished.
What do you call a leader with no followers? A guy taking a walk. It is a line from The West Wing that I often think about. Within the context of the scene and the character, it is a response to a potential loss of leadership.
This situation pops up quite regularly when a relatively simple feature such as the diameter of a hole in a machined part doesn’t appear to be right when the part is at the assembly stage of manufacture. Like similar disputes, the finger pointing begins and compromises are made but the problem doesn’t go away.
